How To Create A Product Messaging Strategy for Tech Startups? 4 Essential Steps

Competitive business environments like SaaS B2B require a customer-focused messaging strategy that captivates the target audiences’ attention and builds curiosity about your products.

To learn exactly how to create a product messaging strategy, we must go back to understanding “why is it important?”. To do that, management professionals suggest answering the “why are we in this business question” by identifying the real value you offer customers in addition to your product(s).

Customer focused messaging must be personalized in order to speak to your customers. Data insights gained through the market, competitor, and buyer persona research are the basis of developing multiple messages that appeals to various market segments.

Our guide aims to answer two important questions, ‘how to create a product messaging strategy?’ and ‘how to develop a product message from scratch?’ As we progress, we will look at popular examples and opinions from product marketing professionals to simplify the message-creation process through their experiences.

4 Essential Steps To Create a Successful Product Messaging Strategy for Tech Startups

Grizzle’s head of content and operations Erica Schneider discusses that in the competitive modern business landscape, it is not possible to entice an entire market to your brand. B2B sellers should focus on their ideal customer profiles, those who will be interested in purchasing your products.

A strategic messaging plan should speak clearly and directly to your target audiences allowing them to recognize why to choose your brand and how your products make the audience feel valued. Here are four essential steps to create a product messaging strategy that Schneider identifies:

1 – Identify the Unique Selling Proposition or the Core Value

Your unique selling proposition (USP) is what differentiates your product from the competition. This unique value or benefit makes your product preferable among the target audience, making it stand out.

Professional marketers identify that USPs help to develop focused messaging, branding, and copywriting to create an appeal among potential customers. Your USP answers the important question “why should they purchase from your brand?”.

An excellent example of a brilliant unique selling proposition embed in the product message comes from online payment provider Stripe.

With a 15.49% market share, close to a million live website customers, and availability across 46 countries, Stripe has become a revered global B2B SaaS provider of fintech solutions. Their value proposition is embedded into their homepage and product page messaging, as a thought leader for the industry.

The brand integrates the success of its customers and the core value to “grow revenue” within its product page messaging. Associating with their Fortune 500 customers builds immense trust with their B2B audiences, while their core product offers multiple pain point solutions.

2 – Identify Your Target Audience and Create Buyer Personas

Understanding the B2B buyer decision-making process and its stakeholders remain crucial to developing messaging that triggers engagement. Creating buyer personas allows product marketers to understand the behavior of different B2B organizations.

In a previous blog we have already detailed the buyer persona research, so do have a look at that for an in-depth understanding. Buyer personas are built through careful social listening, allowing businesses to measure audience intent, desires, and needs.

Another important source of information to determine personas includes existing research. Direct interviews, which can also be online, are an effective means to gather critical audience data to gauge their purchase decision-making.

Your different buyer personas identify different use cases for your product allowing you to develop a core product message, in addition to supporting messaging to go with every buyer persona.

Evernote is an excellent example of demonstrating messaging for different buyer personas. If you notice in the two snapshots the personal product page above has the keep your life on track messaging unique to individual audiences. The supporting message is convenience and management of personal tasks while the core value is “being organized” through Evernote.

The message “tackle any project with Evernote professional” on their professional product page is crafted to appeal to a more professional B2B audience. The supporting message here is amplifying productivity, while the core message remains the same, “being organized” through Evernote.

3 – Craft Stories Around Your Brand & Your Customers

Establishing crafting stories around your brand builds an emotional connection with your audiences, improving both your customer retention and brand loyalty. Your success stories should be created around your brand’s history, customer success stories, and how your products have benefitted customers.

A great example of crafting stories around your brand and customers comes from the B2B CRM provider SalesForce. If you notice on the right side of their home page, they demonstrate the excellence of their product through a story woven around their customers.

An actionable message also highlights how SalesForce helps BPCL create better customer experiences across different business units. The homepage also provides a CTA to start a free trial and offers additional information through real-time demos.

Through in-depth buyer personas research, B2B organizations should build value-driven experiences that should reflect the sentiments, values, behaviors, and preferences of the target audience.

4 – Combine (core values + product story + research into messaging)

Once all the above are accomplished, it is time to put everything together and create the perfect product message strategy. Developing guidelines for your messaging strategy will provide a roadmap for your marketing team to develop more relevant and valuable content collateral, while sales teams will interact in a manner and tone that your target customers expect.

When developing these guidelines keep in mind your startup’s mission statement, unique selling propositions, value proposition, and product benefits. These guidelines will facilitate your marketing teams to create more appealing content for blogs, press releases, marketing emails, sales pitches, presentations, CTAs, etc.

So, your messaging strategy guidelines will direct how:

Marketers will create content and other collateral for your product marketing
Sales teams will engage leads and pitch products.

LucidPress identified in a survey that consistency of brand messaging guidelines can lead to an increase in revenue by 33%. The messaging strategy should preferably include four important elements of your business namely the mission statement, a unique tagline (or USP), brand pillars, and the value proposition.

How Can Chasm Assist In Crafting A Product Messaging Strategy?

At Chasm, we are at the forefront to assist B2B startups with our unique product marketing solutions to give your brand the spotlight it deserves. Our proficient team of consultants brings together unique audience insights and customer research that facilitates the creation of your product messaging strategy.

Through our Positioning, Segmentation, and Messaging Consultancy, we streamline your entire product marketing infrastructure through go-to-market strategies, 30-6-90-day product marketer plans, and B2B buyer persona analysis. Connect with our team today to learn more about how Chasm can assist you to develop more meaningful messaging for your SaaS product.

Conclusion

Great product messaging resonates with audiences over long intervals. Nike’s “Just Do It!”, and, Red Bull’s “Gives Your Wings”, are prime examples of how a great message can echo for generations. For SaaS businesses, however, answering how to create a product messaging strategy can have several competitive benefits.

Creating a message that better explains your B2B product while synergizing it with the pain points of the customer to make it a solution can have a magnifying effect on future innovations. Keeping your product messaging strategy consistent and routinely updating it with more customer-focused ideas is critical to sustaining SaaS business growth.